


You Asked For It

by Thea_Bromine



Series: Kaleidoscope [2]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 14:19:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1160687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Thea_Bromine/pseuds/Thea_Bromine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Giles acts on impulse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Asked For It

It was a long time since he had done this: hands in his pockets, smile on his face, feeling... well, nearly feeling eighteen again. Even in Sunnydale, it was safe enough unaccompanied on the street at this time of day, but he had offered to walk her home, and she had given that knowing smile, and accepted. He had taken her out, and he had walked her home, and he had kissed her on her doorstep. Nothing more than he might have done when he _was_ eighteen. He had asked if he would see her tomorrow, and she had said yes.

Oh bloody hell, he was _dating_. He hadn’t dated since and let’s not go there, he thought, laughing at himself a little. They had gone to the game; he had bought her popcorn and various forms of junk food which he would have scorned if the children had suggested them. She had teased him – again –  about getting away from his books; he had teased her – again – about football. He would never get used to calling it football. Football, he had explained to her, was soccer. What they were watching was rugby for people not brave enough to play rugby. Dear Lord, they had ‘their’ jokes.

He had said something about rugby later too, and reminisced about playing at school and at Oxford; she had sighed theatrically and made big eyes at him, and told him how attractive she found men who could play that sort of game. Not for a moment had he been fooled, nor had she expected him to be, but he had put on an exaggerated swagger until they had both laughed.

He hadn’t thought about playing rugby in years. He’d been quite good in his day: at fourteen he’d been skinny and fast and by seventeen he had come into most of his adult growth, strong and fit. He slowed, wandering now, half lost in memory, reaching for the names of the boys who had played on that team. Henderson, McAffrey, Jennings, Holby... They smiled at him out of the past, and he grinned back, and turned to cross the road. There was someone ahead of him, a hundred yards or so further on, and training overcame nostalgia long enough for him to check for threats and dangers.

Patterson... no, Pattinson. Pattinson who had been so adept at the heeltap tackle, just touching somebody’s heel with the toe of his boot, so that they would lock their ankles together and trip over their own feet. Pattinson hadn’t had the body mass for big tackles; he’d been a smart player, an intelligent one, wickedly fast.

The man ahead looked vaguely familiar, large and rather heavy, slow, the sort who however many years ago would have been surprised to have been felled by Pattinson’s wiry compactness. Or who would never even have known how the trick had been done.

There had been a long Saturday afternoon, with him and Pattinson and Montgomery and... Hall? Hill? out on the pitch, just chucking a rugby ball to and fro, and Pattinson had tripped each of them in turn until it became a game in its own right, how many times any of them could bring down the others. Pattinson had won, of course, but he had suddenly mastered the skill himself, and had tripped Hill – it _was_ Hill – three times in succession.

He was almost level with the man in front, who... he _did_ recognise him, surely?

Oh yes, he did, and his mood darkened. He reached, deliberately, for memory again, unwilling to let it go. They had walked back to the school building together, gone to Montgomery’s study for tea. He had offered to retrieve his mother’s marmalade cake from his own study as his contribution, and as he turned away, Pattinson had tapped his heel and he had sprawled on his face in the corridor, all of them laughing.

He could still remember how it was done: his body remembered, the shuffle, the side-step, the tiny flick –

– and the body ahead of him crashed to the ground, with a smash of breaking glass and a strong smell of cheap bourbon, as he stepped lightly past.

“Drunk again, Mr Harris?”

 

 


End file.
